


The Disappearance of Dr. John Watson's Trousers

by tremendousdetectivetheorist



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Case References, Developing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Established Relationship, Foreplay, Holmes has no boundaries, Holmes is a little bit kinky, Implied Hand Job, M/M, POV John Watson, Smoking, Sort of? - Freeform, Story: The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Watson is miffed, Watson loves it, deduction is sexy, deduction seduction, fun with magnifying glass, leg porn, this whole fic is a giant tease, unorthodox use of ordinary object
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 02:36:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11326896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tremendousdetectivetheorist/pseuds/tremendousdetectivetheorist
Summary: When Watson notices he is missing a pair of trousers and questions Holmes about their disappearance, Holmes guides him in a long search for them-–putting Watson’s observation skills to the test and making him do the legwork--while never leaving 221B.





	The Disappearance of Dr. John Watson's Trousers

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place just after “The Norwood Builder”. I make references to a few cases, following the Granada timeline. That said, I ‘borrowed’ ACD’s purple dressing gown for this. :) Thanks to my wonderful tumblr friends for reading it in beta! Feel free to 'Brit-pick' if needed.

Holmes and I had just been seated for breakfast in Baker Street. He was in a cheery mood, on a high from having revealed a hidden murderer in Norwood, thereby saving his client from being wrongfully hanged for the murder, a case on which I am still ordering my notes.

I, in my usual morning slump, had been waiting for two days to ask Holmes about something pressing on my mind. I thought of it last night at the opera, and earlier in the day when we were in the Yard office, and in the cab ride before that, but I was unable to work up the gumption. You see, Holmes and I are the most intimate of friends, but there are some behaviours we had agreed to forgive, even to the point of silent protest, or loud protest in the case of his addictions. The matter at hand was one unlike any I’d noticed before, and because of the manner of our intimacy, it seemed not a queer enough event to bring up in conversation. Yet it was of a questionable moral slant for a gentleman. I was missing a pair of trousers–the only pair that match my brown jacket. I thought I’d bring it up lightly, by talking about things physically close to their last seen location: my bedroom, a room I have welcomed my friend into on a number of occasions–and see what clues he might furnish me with as to their disappearance. On this day I took longer than usual to prepare myself for breakfast with my flatmate, as I silently rehearsed the scenario. At the dining table, my first cup of coffee gave me enough nerve to ask.

“Holmes…have you noticed the progress of my ship?”

“Yes, my dear fellow, you are making remarkable progress; it looks ready to sail any day. But you are late for breakfast, and you ask such a trifling question with a hint of hesitation in your voice. Tell me now, what is it?”

I continued nervously where I left off. “Every night I adhere some pieces before laying out my suit for the next day. Last night it was the delicate details of the mast…Holmes—I am missing a pair of linen trousers. No one goes into my bedroom except for you, and Mrs. Hudson, but she would have no reason–”

“And you’ve had some difficulty in your sartorial arrangements because of it of late. Oh, Watson, I do hope you’ll forgive me. For I have sent Mrs. Hudson to the tailors to order a pair of trousers to replace the ones that I have necessarily taken for my own disposal.”

“You ‘necessarily’ disposed of MY trousers?”

“Well, I haven’t fully disposed of them; I figure they can be worn by one of the Irregulars—how they grow so fast, some of them are in men’s clothes already–”

“But Holmes, why? What is the purpose of this act?”

“My dear Watson,” he said, and picked up the coffee pot to pour me a cup, “I needed them, most urgently. Do you recall the murder that took place in Norwood, how my most vital witness in solving the case was a 'gentleman of the road’? And how not even dear old Lestrade had caught on that tramps had camped there? Well, I found it in the best interest of the case to dress in tramp costume for the interview. And you’ve seen their dress; it was best that I found a garment not tailored to me in order to look the part. You were at your club when I urgently needed to construct this costume, so I helped myself to the mousiest brown pair of linen trousers in your wardrobe–I should call them mudwater-coloured–and altered them with a pair of shears. Don’t worry, for Mrs. Hudson is at the tailor’s with your measurements at this moment.” He cast his stormy grey eyes down to his cup of coffee, which he appeared to stir with an invisible spoon. He looked up at me again, reading my face for signs of understanding, and slowly spoke, “You know I would have ordered them myself, but it would rouse less…suspicion…for Mrs. Hudson to do it.”

“Of course,” I nodded, resigned to accept the forces behind this insignificant folly in which I had been swept up. I opened my mouth to ask how Mrs. Hudson knew my measurements, but stopped before any words could come. For with a blink of his eyes, I remembered.

Holmes must have seen the memory flood into my face. Or perhaps he thought I was dumbfounded. His tone lifted again. “You do remember that I measured you last night?” He raised his coffee cup with a cheeky smile.

Here my mind recalled last night’s little game, in which he dressed as a tailor complete with measuring tape and yard sticks—in either arm, the option of a measure soft and flexible, or hard and rigid, to suit my whims, he said. I appeared to him as a customer, stripped down to my underclothes, and for nearly two hours his bedroom had been transformed into my own custom tailor shop, in which he, and his lean, exacting arms, were entirely at my service. Little did I know that he would make practical use of the information he gathered when he was measuring me in all manners of torturous ways; his study of me knew no bounds. It seemed whether I was aware or not that he was always measuring some aspect of me. Much about me seems to delight my companion but nothing about me surprises him. He even had a reaction ready for my small outburst that spurred this discourse.

Holmes continued, “I used my own shirt, and my own braces to hold up the trousers. A ratty blanket for a shawl and some ash to smudge my face and hands and I quite looked the part! I gave the cabbie a shock when I climbed out.”

“I’m sure you did, Holmes. And you solved the case and now I’m out a pair of trousers. If I am to wait two weeks for a new pair of trousers from the tailors I’d at least like to see what you put them through in order to obtain your result! Nevertheless I am happy to hear that a pair of shabby trousers helped you in your success.”

He paused, trying to read the tone of my last statement, then seemed to abandon the thought. “They are to be laundered before I turn them over to the Irregulars but, let me warn you that they are a bit”–he tipped his head down slightly–“short.”

“Short….?”

He looked away, then back at me, slightly blushing. “And, my dear, please let me earn your forgiveness by keeping you entertained with the study of your missing trousers, hmm? For there are other…“ he turned his head and shoulders to the side in a slim gesture, leaning away from the dining table, ”…elements that may be of interest to you in this case.” Holmes can be, as observed by my old friend Percy, such an inscrutable fellow.

“My only plan for today was to write, Holmes…but if you have a line of investigation to follow, I am your man.”

“I am so glad to hear it,” Holmes said gaily, then scuttled to his bedroom. I migrated to my chair by the fire and retrieved my notebook and pen. He resurfaced a minute later, still wearing his nightgown and purple dressing gown, lit a cigarette, and sunk into his usual chair. The trousers were nowhere in sight but it was of no matter at the moment; I had been taking notes on what I could remember of his description of the Norwood case, when he pulled his chair close to me in front of the fire, faced me squarely, and gave a low conscious “Now. Watson…” to draw my attention. I paused to look up from my notebook, which he immediately snatched and tossed behind him, nonchalant. I, startled, dropped my pen and began to open my mouth in protest, but seeing my trust reflected in his smoldering eyes overrode my urge to question this beautiful mess of a man whom I call my friend. “In this case I have the advantage of–let’s call it—the clue, which will guide you in the solution of the mystery of your missing trousers.”

In my right hand, now absent of a pen, I felt him place the hard handle of something—I could tell it was metal, warm from his hands. I looked down and saw his magnifying lens. I said nothing, but looked back into his eyes. He puffed his cigarette. “You know my methods.”

This was one of those moments we’ve been coming to frequently of late, in which the boundary between work and recreation, and our boundaries between one another lapped eagerly like the flow of a tide into a shore. Holmes, gently wetting the dry shore of me, brushed a few grains of sand aside with each wave, washing me smooth while I waited, in the place where we met, where I came to him marked with footprints. At the ebb of tides, we politely withdrew from one another until a case or a shared meal called us back together. So far I trusted him in each encounter; I felt safe and guided by him, and shaped by the use of his methods. He had never hurt me, nor made me uncomfortable; yet, he had a way of elevating me to the thrill of not knowing what is next, nor what mark we may establish in the span of our moving shoreline. With past intimate friends, I had more clearly categorized such encounters, but with Holmes I felt myself cautiously wading into a warm pool. In this moment in front of the fire, his eyes anticipated something.

I turned the lens over in my hand with hesitance. “You want…me to…?”

Holmes drew in the smoke of his cigarette, then threw it into the fire. He gave a slight nod, and as his expression changed to mischievous, he bent forward just enough to reach the hem of his nightgown with his left fingertips. Slowly he curled back his thumb and all but his long thin forefinger to raise his hem above his feet, then straightened his finger to lower it again. Maintaining contact between his fingertip and the arch of his foot, he began to trace upward, playfully pulling the fabric up to reveal his skin, then uncurling his finger and the fabric down to cover it again, while watching my responses to his mild teasing game.

After a minute of nothing from me but light perspiration and timid silence, Holmes reached for my left hand, which I rested in his, and guided it to where his finger paused from tracing his hem up the vase of his ankle. He nodded again, in the direction of the magnifying lens in my hand. While maintaining hand contact, I climbed out of my chair and nudged it backward with my feet to make room to kneel before him. He softened his left hand and laid it upon my wrist until I began to direct myself in the task, at which point he leaned back and rested his hands behind his head.

“Now let’s see about finding what happened to those trousers,” I said in the raspy voice I reserve for Holmes, in which I imitated the accent of a certain Scotland Yard Inspector, for laughs. Holmes giggled and thumped his chair at my inappropriately timed slip of humor. “One minor accommodation before I go in…” I smoothed my hands along the front flaps of Holmes’s purple dressing gown, then parted it to the sides, first his right, then his left, exposing the emerald-colored silk lining. The flaps of the gown draped over the arms of the chair like the tail of a peacock outstretched, revealing in full his long white nightgown. Holmes shivered slightly, inhaled deeply, then relaxed into a small sigh. With his head thrown back, his eyes appeared to be barely open, but he was watching me; of that I was certain. I returned to the task of inspection at hand.

Though he was faced away from the windows, I saw through the lens the fine hairs on the backs of his ankles in the overcast morning light, the contrast of his smooth skin against the coarse rug below. His skin glowed by the fire at the front, highlighting the sinews and metatarsal bones of his glorious feet. Trained for swift movement, they now rested before me, pointed to my knees with indulgent languor.

Using my left hand, I continued to raise the hem of his nightgown, lightly stroking his skin as I explored my way up his leg, one square centimeter at a time, mindful to tease the sensitive points of his ankles, as he taught me in the methods he painstakingly employed last night. While I did so, I felt a warm rush through the center of me as I was once again overtaken by the vivid memory. Now I had no yardstick, but my hands and the lens were up to the task, as all the while I recalled how he pushed back our shoreline one centimeter at a time with his finger perched over the edge of the yardstick, then rescinded it a half-centimeter, and up again two more centimeters, until the waves grew exponentially and beyond my calculation. Soon all the numbers and straight lines dissolved into grains of sand as I felt each wave lapping up a little higher, until Holmes rushed into me and soon I was enveloped in one steady motion of wet nourishing pressure. When the big wave rolled back down, the water washed away but the sand remained saturated long afterward; soon I could measure in centimeters again, slowly, evenly, all the way back down, in study of that decadent method of pleasuring that Holmes joked would “grow” on me.

As I was caught up in that flashback it must have shown, because Holmes twitched impatiently and let out a slight groan. I reached for the cushion beneath his arm for something to kneel on.“At my own pace, please, Holmes, as I don’t know just what to anticipate here but you have yet to earn my forgiveness for what you’ve done.” He knew. He, with eyes closed, simply grinned at my stern tease and threw his head back with a chuckle. He had drifted somewhere beyond his primary domain, to a place where words don’t come easily. He raked his hands through his uncombed fluff of hair and pursed his lips before relaxing again.

I proceeded to drag the cold lens upward and around the surface of Holmes’s right calf, which before long elicited a sheet of goose flesh; I then shifted to work his left leg, using my mouth to blow lightly over the surface afterward to continue the cool sensation. Holmes emitted a light, approving rumble from his throat. I held the handle of the glass in my mouth for a moment so that I could use both hands to feel around the backs of his calves, and as I kneaded the softness I found there, I appreciated the girth of Holmes’s muscle anatomy as the harbor of a hot flame of energy that moved him forward when following a scent. I took the lens in hand again and buried my face in the drumstick of his inner calf, feeling the rigid knobs on the surface of his tibia against my cheek and brow, and the soft, lightly hairy flesh of his leg to my nose. He responded by pressing back into me, and for a moment we were bonded, face to leg, each drawn into the softness and the scratch of the other. When I pulled away I saw a patch of redness from our friction, and brushed over it with my knuckles, barely, for soothing.

I smelled traces of lemon and clove, no doubt from his bath routine, but they failed to cleanse him of the unmistakable sweet and smoky fragrance embedded in his skin. “Despite having taken a bath, your skin smells faintly of smoke from a bonfire.” Feeling overtaken by the scent, I pressed my mouth into his flesh to steal a taste. “And you taste like salt…savory…and sweet tobacco…like licorice…”

He wriggled slightly; his hands gripped the arms of his chair. “Yes—good—for I was a gentleman…of…the road…” he murmured. I noticed him roll his tongue back-and-forth in his mouth and wondered how long he had been doing that. Though his face was calm, he appeared to be dreaming with his eyes open, or perhaps fighting an invisible demon. I gently squeezed the lateral side of his calf and for that moment, he was not restless or in a rush; he was grounded in my grip, trusting me and enjoying completely.

I pressed my forehead between his calves, now somewhat tense as I moved my head higher, higher, until I felt soft fabric against my temples. Could this be…? His knees, relaxed and pointed outward, tensed up around my head. I saw his toes wiggle below me. I gave a light kiss on the inside of either leg in hopes to relax him and steal another taste of salt before I drew my head back. Curiously, keeping his hem raised with my hands, I flipped the front of the nightgown upward and folded it onto my friend’s chest. I could not tell if Holmes noticed but for a twitch of a smile, for his eyes were closed.

I would not have recognized the trousers, had I not known them to be missing and altered; but there they were, in their worn, yet dignified, glory. For their intended purpose, they looked truly ragged, and short, as he had warned. They stopped just below his knees and just above where his oval-shaped calf muscles flared out.

I continued to mutter my observations. “My 'mudwater brown’ trousers were made somewhat ashen by the bonfire.” I raised the magnifying lens to them, teasing his knees with my knuckles as I moved the lens over them. I clicked my tongue. “There is a hole beginning in the right knee.” I breathed over it. “Ahhhhh. Do you feel that?” He threw his head to the side. I continued to deduce. “There appear to be traces of some kind of dry grass clinging to the inner seams…the hems have been crudely shortened, with a combination of cutting and rolling.” Holmes, now gnawing on his index finger as if to suppress some excitement, peered down at me, raising his brow as a signal to continue. “The relaxed fit looks comfortable for a tramp to wear, especially if he was a working man.”

The tops of his thighs were a smooth expanse, from which the seams at the center and sides crinkled. The most elaborate system of crinkles before me stretched the linen where it waited, an obtuse point bulging at the center of an angular man.

I shifted my eyes to his face. “I see you dress to the right,” I said with a smile, to see if he appreciated my tailor joke, but the knot of his eyebrows begged me to be serious. Holmes writhed in his chair. I blushed at the sight of his arousal pressing at the inside of a pair of my trousers, but I didn’t move the lens over it, for such a joke would be unkind, and anyway it was apparent that I needed no optical assistance in observing that clue. The only sensible way to employ the lens now would be to place the edge of it along his base—which I did–then stroke upward, not too hard, as though with a comb, up and off before reaching the end. To test the full effects of this unorthodox use of a magnifying lens directly on my detective I would need his approval. Holmes gave me a tormented look while I contemplated the entailment of fulfilling the ultimate destiny of his excitement inside my trousers. What would the consequences be? Might he enjoy that? As that flash of boldness passed me, another one struck, in the form of a polite suggestion. I sat back on my haunches and set down the magnifying lens.

“I say, Holmes,” I looked him in the eye and stroked the back of either leg with my fingertips, “what other…elements of interest…did you say may be in this case, of these trousers that used to be mine?” I eased the tips of my index fingers between his soft skin and the tightly rolled trouser hems, and rolled my tongue against the back of my top teeth, as if to cement my inquiry for a warrant into my former trousers.

Giving a wide smile and a slight snort, he removed his hands from behind his head and reached for my hands. His speech was alert but somewhat strained. “I will show you—if–you forgive me–for making off with your trousers…” His voice cracked, “and if you’ll let me remove them again…” I gave him a mock-stern look. With some shakiness, I felt my hands around the sides of his knees and snaked up the sides of his thighs, at a faster rate than when I inched up his ankles. He swallowed and continued, looking pleased and hopeful, “…only this time, with your permission or preferably your assistance, if you’d be so kind?”

With that, he steadily undid his first trouser button. Though I took much pleasure in watching his long, nimble fingers fiddle a button through a hole, I decided to indulge his request for assistance. I grasped his hands, and with a caress of his palms I placed them on my shoulders, and looked him in the eyes. “I forgive you, dear chap.” I then eagerly finished the task of unbuttoning his–or my—fly with zest, then watched the centimeters of skin grow on him, beckoning my hands to move exponentially faster than I did on my journey up his long, supple legs, which now cradled my torso.

 

Epilogue

“Pins and needles, my dear Watson.” As Holmes and I laid on the rug and watched the flames of the fire dwindle, I could feel the tide recede as he showed signs of blood flowing back into his extremities. Holmes lay on his back with his hands folded over his abdomen. I was on my side, careful not to touch him. He turned his head to face me, his eyes still vulnerable, yet shining with something I read as pride and gratitude. “Watson, you really are catching on to my methods most astutely.” Holmes closed his eyes. I stood up to retrieve a cigar from my case on the mantle, then perched on my elbow next to him. The last thing he said was, “Thank goodness we took them off in time, or they would not have been appropriate to donate.”

I lit a match and puffed at my cigar until I was sure it was lit, stealing a look at Holmes all the while. His lips were parted in a half-smile and his hair, still sweaty, clung to his temples. His eyes appeared to move beneath his lids.

I tossed the match into the fire. “Donate?”

To my remark, Holmes opened his eyes to glance at the trousers still hanging from the arm of his chair. I followed his gaze. The manner in which the trousers hung so straight and neat was comical, as if they offered a question of their own. I returned my gaze to Holmes. He angled his face to look at me and answered with a smirk, then closed his eyes again.

In two weeks’ time I had a new pair of trousers to wear with my brown coat again. My “disappeared” trousers laundered nicely, and the seams stayed intact despite Holmes’s pressings, but nevertheless, we decided to keep them.

**Author's Note:**

> If anybody wants to take that tailor bit and run with it, feel free to! :) I may write my own fic for that part some day but I'm not ready at the moment.


End file.
